"One Aviva", says the cheerful corporate slogan. Two dividend cuts in four years is the reality for suffering shareholders, who must now face the fact that their troubles did not end when Andrew Moss was ejected from the chief executive's office last spring.

The thought then was that plain-speaking chairman John McFarlane could perform some emergency surgery on Aviva and save the dividend. His operations, culminating in a sale of the US business, seemed to go well. Yes, the scar was horrible in the shape of £3.3bn of impairments and writedowns, but at least Aviva could boast a substantially healthier capital surplus.

New boss Mark Wilson, however, has arrived to point out that Aviva's woes run a lot deeper. Financial gearing is too high and the sums of cash being generated are too low to justify a £700m dividend bill. In the past, the problem has been dodged thanks to those shareholders who (foolishly) took their dividend in shares. Enough of that nonsense, Wilson has said, in effect: we'll cut the dividend by 44% so that it can be covered by cash and we'll cancel the scrip option.

The clearing of the decks is justified. As Wilson says, the insurance sector has made an industry out of complexity and it's probably best to start from a position where investors have a dividend they can believe in. All the same, the cut is a crushing blow to the idea that Aviva's problems required only one step backwards; no wonder the shares went 12% lower on Thursday.

What has been exposed – yet again – is that the company was disgracefully undermanaged by overpaid and complacent directors in the decade since it adopted its Aviva monicker. The company was born a couple of years earlier, in effect, from a three-way combination of Norwich Union, Commercial Union and General Accident. A Commercial Accident waiting to happen, said the sceptics, and they have been proved correct. The priority should have been a much harder attack on costs and a rigorous debate on where Aviva should concentrate its resources and capital.

Instead, as McFarlane pointed out when he became chairman, Aviva was still perceived as bureaucratic and inefficient even after taking £1.3bn in restructuring charges over five years; he and Wilson think at least £400m of annual savings can now be achieved. And the US adventure, starting with the £1.6bn acquisition in 2006 of AmerUS, was a blunder born of a misguided ambition to be everywhere.

Good luck to Wilson, who can hardly fail to do better than his predecessors. In the meantime, survey the extraordinary scale of 10 years of failure. First, the dividend will be now be set at the lowest level during the Aviva era. Second, remember that Aviva and Prudential's shares were roughly neck-and-neck at 750p-800p when the former made its vainglorious and doomed offer for the latter in 2006; Aviva's share price now is 319p while Prudential passed £10 this week.

Third – and most remarkable – consider that Aviva's market capitalisation (£9.25bn) has almost converged with that of Standard Life (£8.8bn), a company that a decade ago was in the midst of deep crisis after being over-exposed to equities (and zealous regulators) during 2003's stock market plunge.

On Thursday, Standard Life increased its ordinary dividend by 6.5% and handed out a £300m special dividend. The difference? Standard Life cut costs earlier, has a simpler business model and decided to stick to what it does best, like fund management. In other words, unlike Aviva, it had a strategy.